Also, how crappy must it've felt when you got your assignment as a pilot and it said KAMIKAZE DIVISION. Not great, I'm guessing. "We think so little of your skills as a pilot that we're not asking you to shoot at other planes, or hit a target with a bomb, we're asking you to simply fly the plane into a ship the size of a football field, and then after that your dead ass will no longer be a burden on the military." I mean, these guys must've seen these orders and thought "WOW, are we officially out of ideas."
As Al McGuire once said: "the only real mystery in life is why kamikaze pilots wore helmets."
We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives. - Irokawa Daikichi, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers
Also interesting is the peek behind the curtain of what we are always told to be gung-ho robots more than happy to die for the cause; it wasn't necessarily so:
To be honest, I cannot say that the wish to die for the emperor is genuine, coming from my heart. However, it is decided for me that I die for the emperor.
"It's all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, 'Long live the emperor!' They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into the plane by maintenance soldiers."
"Even now, many faces of my students come up when I close my eyes. So many students are gone. Why did headquarters continue such silly attacks for ten months! Fools! Genda, who went to America—all those men lied that all men volunteered for kamikaze units. They lied."
Fascinating story of one of the lucky ones HERE.
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